The Essential Role of
an Enlightened Witness in Societyby Alice Miller, Ph.D.

Since adolescence I have always wondered why people
take pleasure in humiliating others. Clearly the fact that some
people are sensitive to the suffering of others proves that the
destructive urge is not a universal aspect of human nature. So why
do some tend to solve their problems by violence while others
don't?

Philosophy failed to answer my question, and the Freudian
theory of the death wish has never convinced me. It was only by
closely examining the childhood histories of murderers, especially
mass murderers, that I began to comprehend the roots of good and
evil: not in the genes, as commonly believed, but often in the
earliest days of life. Today, it is inconceivable to me that a
child who comes into the world among attentive, loving and
protective parents could become a predatory monster. And in the
childhood of the murderers who later became dictators, I have
always found a nightmarish horror, a record of continual lies and
humiliation, which upon the attainment of adulthood, impelled them
to acts of merciless revenge on society. These vengeful acts were
always garbed in hypocritical ideologies, purporting that the
dictator's exclusive and overriding wish was the happiness of his
people. In this way, he unconsciously emulated his own parents
who, in earlier days, had also insisted that their blows were
inflicted on the child for his own good. This belief was extremely
widespread a century ago, particularly in Germany.

I found it logical that a child beaten often would quickly pick
up the language of violence. For him, this language became the
only effective means of communication available. Yet what I found
to be logical was apparently not so to most people.

When I began to illustrate my thesis by drawing on the examples
of Hitler and Stalin, when I tried to expose the social
consequences of child abuse, I encountered fierce resistance.
Repeatedly I was told, "I, too, was a battered child, but
that didn't make me a criminal." When I asked for details
about their childhood, I was always told of a person who loved
them, but was unable to protect them. Yet through his or her
presence, this person gave them a notion of trust, and of love.

I call these persons helping witnesses. Dostoyevsky, for
instance, had a brutal father, but a loving mother. She wasn't
strong enough to protect him from his father, but she gave him a
powerful conception of love, without which his novels would have
been unimaginable. Many have also been lucky enough to find
enlightened and courageous witnesses, people who helped them to
recognize the injustices they suffered, to give vent to their
feelings of rage, pain and indignation at what happened to them.
These persons never became criminals.

Anyone addressing the problem of child abuse is likely to be
faced with a very strange finding: it has frequently been observed
that parents who abuse their children tend to mistreat and neglect
them in ways resembling their own treatment as children, without
any conscious memory of their own experiences. It is well known
that fathers who bully their children through sexual abuse are
usually unaware that they had themselves suffered the same abuse.
It is only in therapy, even if ordered by the courts, that they
discover, stupefied, their own history, and realize thereby that
for years they have attempted to act out their own scenario, just
to get rid of it.

How can this be explained? After studying the matter for years,
it seems clear to me that information about abuse inflicted during
childhood is recorded in our body cells as a sort of memory,
linked to repressed anxiety. If, lacking the aid of an enlightened
witness, these memories fail to break through to consciousness,
they often compel the person to violent acts that reproduce the
abuse suffered in childhood, which was repressed in order to
survive. The aim is to avoid the fear of powerlessness before a
cruel adult. This fear can be eluded momentarily by creating
situations in which one plays the active role, the role of the
powerful, towards a powerless person.

But this is not an easy path to rid oneself of unconscious
fears. And this is why the offense is ceaselessly repeated. A
steady stream of new victims must be found, as recently
demonstrated by the pedophile scandals in Belgium. To his dying
day, Hitler was convinced that only the death of every single Jew
could shield him from the fearful and daily memory of his brutal
father. Since his father was half Jewish, the whole Jewish people
had to be exterminated. I know how easy it is to dismiss this
interpretation of the Holocaust, but I honestly haven't yet found
a better one. Besides, the case of Hitler shows that hatred and
fear cannot be resolved through power, even absolute power, as
long as the hatred is transferred to scapegoats. On the contrary,
if the true cause of the hatred is identified, is experienced with
the feelings that accompany this recognition, blind hatred of
innocent victims can be dispelled. Sex criminals stop their
depredations if they manage to overcome their amnesia and mourn
their tragic fate, thanks to the empathy of an enlightened
witness. Old wounds can be healed if exposed to the light of day.
But they cannot be repudiated by revenge.

A Japanese crew shot a film of therapeutic work in a prison in
Arizona, where the method was based, inter alia, on my books. I
was sent the video cassette and found the results very revealing.
The inmates worked in groups, talked a lot about their childhood,
and some of them said, "I've been all over the place, and
killed innocent people to avoid the feelings I have today. But I
know that I can bear these feelings in the group, where I feel
safe. I no longer need to run around and kill, I'm at home here, I
recognize what happened. The past recedes, and my anger along with
it."

For this process to succeed, the adult who has grown up without
helping witnesses in his childhood needs the support of
enlightened witnesses, people who have understood and recognized
the consequences of child abuse. In an informed society,
adolescents can learn to verbalize their truth and to discover
themselves in their own story. They will not need to avenge
themselves violently for their wounds, or to poison their systems
with drugs, if they have the luck to talk to others about their
early experiences, and succeed in grasping the naked truth of
their own tragedy. To do this, they need assistance from persons
aware of the dynamics of child abuse, who can help them address
their feelings seriously, understand them and integrate them, as
part of their own story, instead of avenging themselves on the
innocent.

I have wrongly been attributed the thesis that every victim
inevitably becomes a persecutor, a thesis that I find totally
false, indeed absurd. It has been proved that many adults have had
the good fortune to break the cycle of abuse through knowledge of
their past. Yet I can certainly aver that I have never come across
persecutors who weren't victims in their childhood, though most of
them don't know it because their feelings are repressed. The less
these criminals know about themselves, the more dangerous they are
to society. So I think it is crucial for the therapist to grasp
the difference between the statement, "every victim
ultimately becomes a persecutor," which is false, and
"every persecutor was a victim in his childhood," which
I consider true. The problem is that, feeling nothing, he
remembers nothing, realizes nothing, and this is why surveys don't
always reveal the truth. Yet the presence of a warm, enlightened
witness - therapist, social aid worker, lawyer, judge - can help
the criminal unlock his repressed feelings and restore the
unrestricted flow of consciousness. This can initiate the process
of escape from the vicious circle of amnesia and violence.